Simian Army

Definition - What does Simian Army mean?

The Simian Army is an open-source IT setup developed by Netflix to handle various cloud computing issues and challenges. It is built with a variety of Simian Army Monkey tools to help ensure network health, promote efficient traffic and locate security problems.

Techopedia explains Simian Army

Netflix moved from a business that was largely DVD-by-mail to being one of the biggest user of bandwidth on the Internet from its streaming video solutions.

In creating the Simian Army, Netflix began with Chaos Monkey, described as a tool that targets individual production instances and disables them to provide more stable and consistent operations. Netflix then introduced Latency Monkey, which simulates partial network downtime, and Conformity Monkey, which enforces network consistency. Janitor Monkey eliminates excess digital clutter in a cloud environment, and Doctor Monkey performs network health checks.

Other tools, like Security Monkey, 10-18 Monkey and Chaos Gorilla are also part of this ground-breaking IT system. Netflix engineers suggest that the future of the Simian Army is relatively open and that in the future, new ideas will grow this concept.